I like the pace of technology, both in finance and in health care, which I occasionally stray into. I have written for Securities Industry News, Risk, Institutional Investor and Alpha. For ten years I edited Windows in Financial Services, covering Microsoft technology in finance, and I continue to write for Banking Technology and Trading Places, both in London.

Managing Financial Data Growth with 30-40X Compression

Investment banking CIOs are in a pinch — volumes and revenues are down, profits are down, regulations are up.

“Our growth rate for data storage is 40 percent year on year,” said a chief technologist of an investment bank which is a RainStor client but did not want to be identified. “We had been able to keep our storage budget flat because the price of storage has dropped 30 percent for as long as we have managed it.”

More recently the bank has kept costs down only by tiering storage and playing off vendors. But now that the price of storage is starting to plateau even while data volumes have grown and the business has asked IT to reduce the storage budget. The bank turned to RainStor, which can compress data by up to 97 percent, providing big savings on storage.

“We know we are facing larger volumes, since we have to continued ingest data because of new regulatory rules and requirements,” said the banking IT executive. “Sixty percent of the increase is regulatory data. It has no direct business value; it’s data we have to keep because we are regulated. The compression ratio we get from Oracle or Sybase 1.5x to 2x while backend storage providers give us 10x.”

With RainStor, the bank can compress its trading log app to a degree he described as a vacuum-packing regulatory data into the smallest space possible while still being to query it without changing anything in the firm’s operations.

John Bantleman, CEO of RainStor, said it can take petabytes of information and store them in terabytes.

“We massively compress information and reduce the cost of managing data at scale,” he said. “Pretty much every bank on Wall Street has huge pressures to reduce IT costs, but now they have to manage data at a rate and pace they haven’t seen before. One CIO told me that he has to manage 70 percent data growth — 100 petabytes this year and expects 170 next year.” Another CIO said his bank wants him to shave expenses by a decimal point.

RainStor achieves its high compressions rates because it de-dupes data at a granular level, Bantleman said. It can run on high-end systems and on Hadoop or cloud installations. RainStor also offers fully SQL access so firms don’t have to learn a new way to interact with their data.

“They don’t have to change connectivity to get at the new scalable infrastructure,” said Bantleman.

One large retail bank working with RainStor has a data warehouse with about one petabyte of data dating back to 2009. But the bank wants to know what happened before the 2008 crash. They want to go back to 2000 or even the nineties to model customer behavior.

“You have the ability with new data environments to solve these massive data problems,” Bantleman said.

In addition to the regulatory requirements to store data for seven years, banks face internal demands for data to use in modeling and trying to understand the behavior of the marketplace, Bantleman added.

“The data has to not only be online but accessible quickly.”

The investment bank’s next step will be to use RainStor as a database archiving solution for applications. While tape can require two to three days to access, RainStor can provide cheap storage that is just 20 to 30 percent slower than online operations access.

“For us right now we are vacuum packing our data, taking our winter clothes and sticking them under bed,” said the technology executive.

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